I love She-Ra and I loved every moment of Season 5 but I think we as fans should be clear: there were no redemption arcs in it. We got the story of love and (girl)friendship in it, not the story of Catra's redemption (or Hordak's). https://twitter.com/ElleOnWords/status/1263828391565955073

And I think it's justifiable in-universe that in a time of total war against a conqueror who wants to wipe out all traces of other minds on their planet as a pit stop to wiping out all life in the universe, that yes, everybody rolls with Catra changing sides. Common enemies.

Because the curtains close and the cast bows, we don't see what happens next, which would have been a very uncomfortable period of adjustment for a planet that had previously been divided in allegiance between the child-slaving, conquering Horde remnant and its resistance.

Complicating this is that Etheria would suddenly be dealing with an entire universe of people who had been on the edge of extinction from the greater scope threat that Etheria had only *just* learned about, and which would see all of Etheria as heroes.

On a moral level, realizing that there was someone both more evil and more dangerous than Hordak out there doesn't make what Hordak did any better but on a psychological level, Etherians having united with members of his former horde to fight Prime could help mend things.

Which is one of the things when we talk about redemption and who it's for. If Etherians wind up feeling like the horde squaddies who immediately switched sides or deserted when they saw a chance were also victims and then allies against the real enemy...

...then any "redemption" that the Lonnies, Kyles, and Rogelios of the world end up seeking is them working through how they feel about the things they did while wearing the helmet, and what those things did to them.

But they're also going to spend the rest of their lives running into people who can't or won't forgive the Horde for what happened to their own families and loved ones, no matter how they feel about themselves or how Etherian society at large does.

And those were people who weren't given much of a choice, and when they finally realized they had one, the choice they made was to stop, to leave, to take their chances on survival outside the Horde.

Catra actively sought to be the one making the decisions for the Horde.

Right. On a psychological and cultural level, there's a lot of things going on that might contribute to an "It was the war, times were different" attitude for many. https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1263836545884315648

I don't think it's impossible for Etheria to re-unify and absorb most of the former Horde, or for people to accept Catra and Scorpia's allegiances (Hordak is another question... I feel like he and Entrapta are going to have to be off seeing the universe, but they'd prefer that.).

But it's not a redemption story. That's not the story they were telling.

What I'm interested in is the story of the Prime bodies who are suddenly free-willed. We saw Hordak at the end of a process of figuring out what to do with himself, and Wrong Hordak at the beginning of it.

They were both essentially children of the moral universe. No one had taught them right from wrong, because Prime was right. No learned empathy because they had been part of a hivemind.

Hordak tried to recreate what he had known with Prime, with himself at the center.

Presumably he had a long dark night of the soul similar to Wrong Hordak's, possibly lessened in intensity by dint of being stretched out longer, by his already having felt rejected.

Wrong Hordak, though, shows us that even as a moral child, a freed clone *can* make the right decisions. And I like to think he will be the one to help his brothers through their difficult transition to free will.

Buuuut even though the clones were Prime's victims and literally had no free will, they are still the actual face of oppression and genocide throughout the galaxy.

Is it fair or right to blame them for their genetic origin? Nope. But will it happen? Yes.

The fact that Prime used the same mind control technology and techniques on other people might help ameliorate that, though. A lot of people will know exactly what they felt, and that they had no choice.

But this gets at the heart of the tricky question of what we mean by redemption: do we mean on some sort of external moral scale, do we mean a change of heart, or do we mean a change of their relationship to others?

And I don't mean "relationship to others" as in Catradora, I mean how the people of all those D&D animalfolk villages feel about Catra having knocked their houses over with tanks fortnightly.

If I am qualified to judge the objective morality of any person... I throw up my hands in despair at judging Hordak. Was he eeeeevil as in the fruiiits of the devilll? He was dangerous. He did harm. He can't expect or demand forgiveness or trust or people enjoying his company.

(And when I say I don't know how to judge Hordak, I'm not saying "enslaving children for soldiers isn't evil". I'm saying, don't ask me to parse out how much accountability for that falls to him and how much to Prime for raising him up in that mindset and then cutting him off.)

I also kind of hope Wrong Hordak keeps that name, because it was the first name he was given (and he's the first clone to be given a name by someone else!) and being able to admit they were wrong will be an important lesson for the clones.

Wrong Hordak and also Hordak's brief description of his times with the Galactic Horde makes it clear that the clones *do* think, even if they think mostly what Prime tells them to. We see the chipped are still somewhat themselves. This is why the clones act as religious zealots.

Because since Horde Prime can't exert total control on more than one body at a time, it is convenient that his most trusted servitors be given personalities that are filled with nothing but loyalty to him. Their worship of him is not just to feed his ego, but to condition them.

And so the newly freed clones, like Wrong Hordak did when his connection was severed, will weep for what they lost, and believe that the universe lost something great and beautiful and pure.

The first step in getting past that will be learning that they were wrong, that the view of the universe that had been instilled in them was wrong.

(The fact that they were kept as children will help make them resilient, I hope.)

Anyway, like I said, I loved season 5. I think Catra, like Loki, has a character arc that is not about moral decisions but emotional ones. They're Double Down Villains. They do something for id reasons, and when the consequences hit, they escalate.

Back when the show was starting, I compared the act of writing it to playing with a box of toys. The showrunner kind of infamously didn't watch the 80s cartoon. It was not a remake of that show but a new adaptation of the actual source material, a toy line.

So I think there's a certain element to the storytelling of "We're playing with toys." that leads to looking at the characters and figuring out interesting things to do with them.

You know, like give one a haircut and then shoving them together to make them kiss.

And I think there's also a certain amount of playing with the conventions of the genre where friendship and love are literally forms of magic with healing powers.

But Catra's story is not a redemption story so much as it is about her finding a place where she can actually stand, after spending her whole life thinking that place will be at the top of the power structure.

And I love that story, and I love her.

But figuring out she's more comfortable on Adora's lap than at the top of the tower (she's *such* a cat) is a story about her and her needs and feelings, and doesn't deal with what she's done to *others*.

Maybe the most important thing from the finale was the decision to go out and "bring magic back to the universe" because, again, Catra and even Hordak could be heroes to the rest of the universe. The non-Etherian universe doesn't even know Catra.

And it makes sense. The only home Catra knew on Etheria was the crumbling Fright Zone, the scene of her psychological torment and the site of her crimes. I don't think she'd miss it.